Presentation given by Mahendra Mahey at the Reading 35,000 Books: The UCD Contagion Project and the British Library Digital Corpus event on 20 February 2019

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
http://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Running since March 2013

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Who do we work with?
Researchers
https://goo.gl/WutNyi Artists
http://goo.gl/nNKhQ2
Librarians
Curators
https://goo.gl/9NWZUW
Software Developers
https://goo.gl/7QQ5Tf
Archivists
https://goo.gl/x7b4tg
Educators
https://goo.gl/qh01Mi
Working and Communicating
Entrepreneurs
https://goo.gl/Fx8RG7
Within Digital Scholarship

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Competition
Awards
Projects
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content (2013-16)
Show us what you have already done with our digital content in research,
artistic, commercial, learning and teaching, staff categories
Talk to us about working on collaborative projects
Tell us your ideas of what to do with our digital content
Engagement
• Roadshows
• Events
• Meetings
• Conversations
New! Digital Research Support
How?

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Finding Open Cultural Heritage Datasets
Collection Guides (233 as of 20/02/2019)
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/
Datasets about our collections
Bibliographic datasets relating to our published and archival holdings
Datasets for content mining
Content suitable for use in text and data mining research
Datasets for image analysis
Image collections suitable for large-scale image-analysis-based research
Datasets from UK Web Archive
Data and API services available for accessing UK Web Archive
Digital mapping
Geospatial data, cartographic applications, digital aerial photography and
scanned historic map materials
https://data.bl.uk
Download collections as zips, no API
Each dataset has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
can be referenced for research
Not all discoverable via
search engines!

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
65,000 digitised 19th Century books
Image: Artwork by Alicia Martin
2007 / 2008
Paid for by:
For a full list:
https://goo.gl/HqPQMS
Subjects include:
Philosophy
Poetry
History
Literature
1789 - 1876

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Collection Guide
https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/digitised-printed-books

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Working with the MS Books Collection
• Metadata*
• Page level images
• OCR Text
• Flickr Commons - images snipped out and user generated tags for images
• 19th Century Books Collection data

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
30 August 2012

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Metadata
MicrosoftBooks.xls - Over 65,000 titleshttps://goo.gl/cvX5pN

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Subsets of Metadata
https://goo.gl/ACAa9R

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Analysing Spreadsheet
For Finnish Titles
Finding digitised books and images about
Finland in a collection of 65,000 books
https://goo.gl/8rQWo7
Ruby Dixon – School work experience 2016 - https://goo.gl/AniJiP

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Analysing Spreadsheet
For Russian Language Titles
Finding digitised books in the Russian Language
in a collection of 65,000 books
https://goo.gl/dSG1Du
Nadya Miryanova – School work experience 2017 - https://goo.gl/suzMGm & https://goo.gl/kGyxK2

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Fiction / Non Fiction
Christine Hoene

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Latin American Studies
Show low tech filtering

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
UCL Data Curation Project

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Digging deeper - OCR Text – JSON File
https://data.bl.uk/digbks/db14.html

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
British Library Flickr Commons
https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/
Flickr Commons has items from
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM)
(Mostly Public Domain)

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
All illustrations in book / books in same year!
All the illustrations in this book Other illustrations books published
in the same year

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Flickr Commons API
https://www.flickr.com/services/api/

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Using the Wikimedia Synoptic Index
• Created to help find all the maps in the books
• Great resource if you want to find things by place!
https://goo.gl/zuxRnG

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Maps Georeferenced – http://www.bl.uk/maps

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Google Fusion Table (Geodata for Maps)
• https://goo.gl/yn3jUd

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Alston Index
Internal Document
55-602 - Topical Index
603 - 925 - Pressmark Sequence925 page document of BL /
British Museum Pressmarks

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Alston Index
• Internal document (not to be externally shared)
• Published in 1987 – dot matrix printed
• Refers to British Museum and British Library Pressmarks / Shelfmarks
• Shelfmarks are used internally to identify books, location and topics

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Augment Library Catalogue?

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@BL_Labs @BL_DigiSchol mahendra.mahey@bl.uk
Previous collaborations with UCD
• Supporting the Irish Research Council funded - ‘Nation, Gender and Genre’
project (University College Dublin) project by providing the OCR text from 65,000
volumes digitised works from between the 17th and 19th Centuries,
http://goo.gl/jvDTXB
• Current experiments with Alston Index and MS Books